Week 6 — in Retrospect
For the past six weeks I’ve been writing about my experience learning fullstack software development — my goal is to be good enough to land a SWE internship next summer.
This post covers the latest of those weeks (4/10 ~ 10/10).
What’s gone well:
- Routinizing: I’ve established a regular sleep schedule. This means I have a routine in which I spend the first couple of hours each day to working on this. I went from 6 hours spent on software last week to 13 hours this week. My aim is to get to ~20 hours/week, outside of my full course load.
What’s gone poorly:
- Thinking: One trap that’s hard to avoid is simply copying and pasting the code from the samples into my own exercising. While this saves time, I’m worried it leaves me with a superficial understanding of what I’m doing, and why. I’ve partly remedied this by jotting down the function of the code I plan to write on paper before implementing. This keeps me focussed and helps me understand the code I’m writing. The exercises are typically hard enough that I have to think — I can’t get away with just copying. I suppose this is more a pre-emptive concern.
What I’ve built:
The backend for a StumbleUpon-esque site, in which users can post their favourite blog posts and vote on the blog posts that others have posted. I’ve implemented the functionality for handling and storing the blog posts, as well as login functionality. I’ve also implemented authentication via jsonwebtokens, and storing passwords with bcrypt.
The next part of the course involves implementing a functional frontend for this website.
Repo for this week’s work: https://github.com/anirudhkannan9/part4
Repos for all work on the course so far:
Heroku websites w/ functioning frontends:
- Phonebook: https://phonebook3-backend.herokuapp.com/
- Notes app: http://safe-meadow-23610.herokuapp.com/
